by Paul Theroux
And later:
I had before me what I think must be the strangest sight that the world has in it for the eyes of man. For what I looked at was the host of wrecked ships, the dross of wave and tempest, which through four centuries — from the time when sailors first pushed out upon the great western ocean — has been gathering slowly, and still more slowly wasting, in the central fastnesses of the Sargasso Sea.
Janvier, a traveller, was widely read in his time, which was just a century ago. On his death, the appreciative New York Times obituary praised Janvier for his “suave irony, gentle aloofness”, and went on, “His varied books of travel had the same combination of qualities — keen and close observation, with a curious sympathy of understanding and vividness of presentation.”
Edgar Rice Burroughs: “I Can Write Better About Places I’ve Never Seen”
MANY PEOPLE, OF whom I am one, formed their first notions of Africa from the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs, specifically the Tarzan books — and films and illustrated comics. Even knowing this was fantasy adventure, readers, young ones especially, felt an incomparable thrill. Burroughs never set foot in Africa, though he knew something about roughing it — he’d been a cowboy, a soldier in the Seventh Cavalry, and a gold miner in Idaho.
He was one of those American writers who was so full of speculative schemes (Twain was another) that they worked their way into his fiction. Burroughs had been a poor student, a failed businessman, and somewhat desperate as a writer when, at the age of thirty-six, he published Tarzan of the Apes as a serial in All-Story magazine. He’d been fascinated by the ethnographic exhibits (native dances, grass skirts, African warriors) and zoo animals he’d seen in Chicago at the World’s Columbian Exhibition in 1893. He’d read Burton and Stanley on Africa, as well as H. Rider Haggard adventures and Kipling’s Jungle Book. He was asked many times how he came up with the idea of Tarzan. He claimed he didn’t know (though Tarzan’s upbringing can be compared with Mowgli’s in Kipling, and Kipling mentions Tarzan approvingly in his own autobiography, Something of Myself), but said that the character helped him escape from the humdrum life he was leading. “My mind, in relaxation, preferred to roam in scenes and situations I’d never known. I find that I can write better about places I’ve never seen than those I have.”
In Tarzan of the Apes (1914), Tarzan is John Clayton, the son of Lord Greystoke, whose wife has died while living in a remote cabin in West Africa. The female ape Kala, grieving for her own dead baby, kills Lord Greystoke and abducts young Clayton, whom she calls Tarzan (“white skin” in ape language), raising him as her own. Jane Porter, another castaway, also turns up in this first novel, along with a cast of sinister opportunists. Tarzan is not sure who he is, but his skills and his strength have made him Lord of the Jungle. The book was such a hit with readers that a year later he wrote The Return of Tarzan (featuring his marriage to Jane), and altogether twenty-five Tarzan books, other stories with an African setting, as well as a number of westerns and works of science fiction.
After a prolific career as a writer of adventure stories, quite wealthy, living in Hawaii and feeling neglected, Burroughs, at the age of sixty-six, witnessed the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He immediately signed up as a war correspondent and travelled throughout the Pacific. He remained in Hawaii until the end of the war.
It is obvious that as he continued to write the Tarzan books he mugged up on Africa. The setting for the Tarzan stories appears to be the Gabon of Du Chaillu’s Exploration and Adventures in Equatorial Africa. He would have found Swahili in Burton, since Tarzan’s Waziri people use accurate Swahili words, such as Mulungu for God, askari for soldier, and shifta for bandit. Tarzan becomes their chief after their own chief dies battling Arab slave traders. A lovely African girl in Tarzan: The Lost Adventure is named Nyama. This is the Swahili word for meat, as well as a generic word for game (and a slang word in East Africa for a low woman). But in all the books Africans are primitive (Tarzan usually mocks them) and not to be compared with the apes, Tarzan’s real family. Civilized man is worse than any other — “more brutal than the brutes”. The great apes, the Mangani, who are Tarzan’s extended family, have a whole language to themselves, which Burroughs invented or contrived from travel book glossaries. One can easily see that Tarzan is the creation of an armchair traveller, a devourer of travel books.
Saul Bellow’s Fairly Serious Fooling
BELLOW HAD NOT seen Africa before he wrote Henderson the Rain King (1959), his novel about the larger-than-life Eugene Henderson — war hero, pig farmer, ranter. Very tall and very strong and highly ingenious, Henderson describes himself as “a millionaire wanderer and wayfarer”, and he adds, “A brutal and violent man driven into the world … A fellow whose heart said, I want, I want.”
This novel, Bellow’s favourite, is his weakest, and perhaps because of that, his most revealing: slack writing is full of disclosure.
Bellow, henpecked, exasperated, in need of imaginative relief, felt cornered in an unhappy marriage when he conceived and wrote the book. The African setting, the freedom of Henderson to roam and rant, the transformation that fiction writing allows, were probably a consolation to Bellow. If he couldn’t go to Africa and leave his miseries behind, at least he could fantasize about such an escape.
“I am just a traveller,” Henderson says to King Dahfu. But to Chief Itelo he said, “Your Highness, I am really kind of on a quest.” It seems to me that this is the crux of the matter: Bellow cannot imagine an Africa that is not full of marvels, odd customs, harems, wrestling matches, lion hunts, and the mystical rain ceremony that elevates Henderson to kingship among the Wariri, in the same way that Tarzan is elevated to chief of the similar-sounding Waziri in The Return of Tarzan.
In the imagined world of the non-travelling fiction writer there is usually a convergence of the grotesque and the stereotypical. A comparison of Henderson with Tarzan is not out of place. The difference is that Burroughs admitted he was writing pulp fiction, while the highly intelligent Bellow, self-conscious in this role as fabulist, often plays it for laughs. This novel — strained comedy, occasional farce, and sometimes outright clowning — is unconvincing to anyone who has lived in an African village, yet when Bellow won the Nobel Prize, Henderson was commended as his “most imaginative expedition”.
Burton’s First Footsteps in East Africa is invoked by Henderson. But the antiquated nature of the travel and Bellow’s invented tribes make me think that (like Edgar Rice Burroughs) he was influenced more by Paul Du Chaillu’s 1861 Exploration and Adventures in Equatorial Africa, in which Du Chaillu, an American of French descent, was made a king of the Apingi tribe in Gabon.
Du Chaillu wrote, “Remandji said, ‘You are the spirit, whom we have never seen before. We are but poor people when we see you. You are of those whom we have often heard of, who come from nobody knows where, and whom we never hoped to see. You are our king and ruler; stay with us always. We love you and will do what you wish.’ Whereupon ensued shouts and rejoicings; palm wine was introduced, and a general jollification took place, in the orthodox fashion at coronations. From this day, therefore, I may call myself Du Chaillu the First, King of the Apingi.”
Henderson becomes the Rain King in a similar fashion. Challenged by an interviewer about the reality in his novel, Bellow replied, “Years ago, I studied African ethnography with the late Professor Herskovits. Later he scolded me for writing a book like Henderson. He said the subject was much too serious for such fooling. I felt that my fooling was fairly serious. Literalism, factualism, will smother the imagination altogether.”
This seems to me a delusion on Bellow’s part, yet another delusion of the non-travelling writer.
Arthur Waley: Not Madly Singing in the Mountains
DESPITE PUBLISHING MORE than twenty volumes of his translations from Chinese and Japanese, including The Way and the Power, Tao Te Ching, The Analects of Confucius, and Murasaki’s Tale of Genji, Waley never travelled to
China or Japan.
Waley claimed that he didn’t want to risk being disappointed by seeing the real places so bewitchingly described in poetry and prose. Was this so? The Yale Sinologist Jonathan Spence wrote in the journal Renditions, “One can make all kinds of guesses concerning Waley’s reasons for not going to Asia: that he didn’t want to confuse the ideal with the real, or that he was interested in the ancient written languages and not the modern spoken ones, or that he simply could not afford the journey. Certainly we are safe in assuming that the trip would have been disconcerting.”
Modern China would surely have disconcerted him. Waley was happier in his imagined Tang Dynasty. Here is one of his great translations, and a wonderful affirmation of nature, from the Tang poet Po Chu-i:
Madly Singing in the Mountains
There is no one among men that has not a special failing:
And my failing consists in writing verses.
I have broken away from the thousand ties of life:
But this infirmity still remains behind.
Each time that I look at a fine landscape,
Each time that I meet a loved friend,
I raise my voice and recite a stanza of poetry
And am glad as though a God had crossed my path.
Ever since the day I was banished to Hsun-yang
Half my time I have lived among hills.
And often, when I have finished a new poem,
Alone I climb the road to the Eastern Rock.
I lean my body on the banks of white stone:
I pull down with my hands a green cassia branch.
My mad singing startles the valleys and hills:
The apes and birds all come to peep.
Fearing to become a laughing-stock to the world,
I choose a place that is unfrequented by men.
V. S. Pritchett: A Lot of Verisimilitude, and a Howler
PRITCHETT WROTE Dead Man Leading, a novel set in Brazil, in 1937, years before he finally travelled there. The novel describes the quest of some explorers who have been lost in the jungle. Pritchett said that he was inspired by the Fawcett expedition of 1925, which vanished (probably massacred) while searching for a lost city deep in the Mato Grosso.
One of the reasons Pritchett’s book is persuasive is that he makes imagery so familiar. He speaks of the brown of a Brazilian river resembling strong tea, and a sky like a huge blue house; the forest is faint, like “a distant fence”, and the jungle at another point is bedraggled and broken, “as if a lorry had crashed into it”. There is a creek “like a sewage ditch” and a bad rainstorm making “the intolerable whine of machines” and a forest odour “like the smell of spirits gone sour on the breath”.
Much later, after he made a visit to Brazil, Pritchett concluded that he had invented the truth. But not entirely. One of the howlers in the book is the mention of “the gulping Lear-like laugh” of an orang-utan. There are no orang-utans in Brazil. They are found ten thousand miles away, in Borneo, and in any case they seldom make a sound.
A Truly Kafkaesque America
FRANZ KAFKA CANNOT be held accountable for the title of his novel Amerika. Left unfinished, it was published after his death by his friend and literary executor, Max Brod, who gave it this name. Kafka usually referred to it as Der Verschollene (The Missing Person or The Man Who Disappeared). The man in question went to America.
Though Kafka never got farther west from his home in Prague than France, in his letters to Brod he fantasized about travelling to distant places, among them South America, Spain, and the Azores. In affectionate letters he asked two women at the periphery of his life, Felice Bauer and Dora Diamant, to travel with him to Palestine, where he dreamed of abandoning writing, getting healthy, and landing a job as a waiter. This waiter fantasy occurred in 1923, the year before he died. Claiming that he suffered from “travel anxiety” (Reiseangst), Kafka did not go to any far-off places. His real fear was that by travelling — being away from his room, his desk, his books — he would put an end to his writing. His invented America is based on his reading, and he was said to have been influenced by Amerika Heute und Morgan (America Today and Tomorrow), by an itinerant Hungarian, Arthur Holitscher, who had travelled around the United States as a sceptical tourist. In this book, as in Kafka’s Amerika, the misspelled name “Oklahama” occurs often.
The fictional result is surreal. In the first sonorous paragraph, the hero, Karl Rossmann, sails into New York harbour and sees the Statue of Liberty, “as if in a burst of sunlight. The arm with the sword now reached aloft, and about her figure blew the free winds.” The sword instead of the torch is perhaps deliberate.
After the shock of a chaotic, unrecognizable New York City and an interlude with his uncle Edward Jakob, Karl spends some time with a wealthy Mr. Pollunder at a labyrinthine mansion outside the city. Not much countryside is described, yet we don’t expect daffodils and shady glens from Kafka. We expect anxiety dreams, and predictably the narrative becomes like an anxiety dream, even to Uncle Jakob’s suddenly sending Karl away, for no apparent reason. Karl looks for a job, hooks up with two tramps, and hits the road. Just outside the city they look back and see a bridge: “The bridge connecting New York to Boston hung delicately over the Hudson and trembled if one narrowed one’s eyes. It appeared to bear no traffic, and a long smooth lifeless strip of water stretched underneath.”
Karl becomes an elevator operator at the Occidental Hotel, in a large, Middle European–seeming city, and eventually reconnects with the two tramps, who are living with, and looking after, a very fat diva-prostitute named Brunelda (one of their tasks is to bathe her). The novel remained incomplete but is full of tantalizing fragments, including a brothel named Enterprise No. 25 and the Nature Theater of Oklahama. In every sense, this America, the morbid dream of a tubercular genius in a room in Prague, is Kafkaesque.
Travel Wisdom of
EVELYN WAUGH
Evelyn Waugh knew better than most people that there is a great deal of pleasure to be derived from a travel book in which the traveller is having a bad time — even better if it is an ordeal. Travel gave him fame as a young man, and though he said (see below) he did not travel to collect material, his fiction was enriched by his travel, from Black Mischief at the beginning of his career to The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold near the end. Many theorists of travel have claimed that Waugh’s travel writing represents the high-water mark of the genre; this is demonstrably untrue, yet Waugh’s travel is personal and opinionated, with episodes of high comedy. It is surprising that a man who cared for comfort and high society risked deep discomfort and low company in Africa and South America, but that he was a much hardier, more diligent, and fairer-minded traveller than he let on.
One does not travel, any more than one falls in love, to collect material. It is simply part of one’s life. For myself, and many better than I, there is a fascination in distant and barbarous places, and particularly in the borderlands of conflicting cultures and states of development, where ideas, uprooted from their traditions, become oddly changed in transplantation. It is here that I find the experiences vivid enough to demand translation into literary form.
—Ninety-two Days (1934)
To have travelled a lot, to have spent, as I have done, the first twelve years of adult life on the move, is to this extent a disadvantage. At the age of thirty-five one needs to go to the moon, or some such place, to recapture the excitement with which one first landed at Calais.
—When the Going Was Good (1947)
I do not think I shall ever forget the sight of Etna at sunset; the mountain almost invisible in a blur of pastel grey, glowing on the top and then repeating its shape, as though reflected, in a wisp of grey smoke with the whole horizon behind radiant with pink light, fading gently into a grey pastel sky. Nothing I have seen in Art or Nature was quite so revolting.
—Labels (1930)
My o
wn travelling days are over, nor do I expect to see many travel books in the near future. When I was a reviewer, they used, I remember, to appear in batches of four or five a week, cram-full of charm and wit and enlarged Leica snapshots. There is no room for tourists in a world of “displaced persons”. Never again, I suppose, shall we land on foreign soil with letter of credit and passport (itself the first faint shadow of the great cloud that envelopes us) and feel the world wide open before us.
—When the Going Was Good
When we have been home from abroad for a week or two, and time after time, in answer to our friends’ polite inquiries, we have retold our experiences, letting phrase engender phrase, until we have quite made a good story of it all; when the unusual people we have encountered have, in retrospect, become fabulous and fantastic, and all the checks and uncertainties of travel had become very serious dangers; when the minor annoyances assume heroic proportions and have become, at the luncheon-table, barely endurable privations; even before that, when in the later stages of our journey we reread in our diaries the somewhat bald chronicle of the preceding months — how very little attention do we pay, among all these false frights and bogies, to the stark horrors of boredom.
— Remote People (1931)
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Travellers’ Bliss
BLISS IS RARE IN THE TRAVEL NARRATIVE, where the usual theme is hardship and sometimes horror. Our happiness in print in any case always seems boastful and improbable, quite far from the human condition. But now and then the traveller arrives at the Great Good Place, gives thanks for his luck, and shows the reader that the travail which gave the word “travel” its form can result in an epiphany, like Doughty’s triple rainbow or Vikram Seth’s sight of the Potala Palace. The first traveller is William Bartram, who spent four years among Native Americans in the South and, contradicting all the reports of pugnacity and savagery, found only hospitality, goodwill, and wisdom. He described the people who were later expelled from their native land to travel westward on the Trail of Tears.
